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When I worked for Flywheel (which was an Uber competitor that uses taxis, and whose customers were concentrated heavily in San Francisco), there were a number o
by aetherson 9y ago
When I worked for Flywheel (which was an Uber competitor that uses taxis, and whose customers were concentrated heavily in San Francisco), there were a number of different, crazy seasonal effects.
Rainy weather definitely spiked demand in a big way (I sometimes wonder if Flywheel would have managed to make it over a few more hurdles if California had not been in an intense multi-year drought when I worked there). There was virtually no demand from Christmas to New Years, and then New Years Eve saw demand that was 10x what it was on other days. There are other extremely high-demand holidays such as Halloween and St Patrick's Day. Basically any drinking holiday, for obvious reasons, except 4th of July.
Uber is in many more markets, of course, though I suspect that a smaller number than you'd think are by far the heavyweights in their revenue and an even smaller number are the heavyweights in terms of improving their bottom line. They have surge pricing, which we didn't, and which is presumably better at turning demand into revenue than we were. Other markets may have different relationships with their weather than San Francisco did.